Dynamos preserved their BancABC sponsorship yesterday when they took to the field in the NetOne Charity Shield football final against Motor Action at the National Sports Stadium clad in the blue and white kit supplied by the regional banking group.
The group will also bankroll this year’s Super Eight competition. Twenty-four hours before the match, BancABC put it in no uncertain terms that Dynamos would only play using their own kit and not that of NetOne.
Net One knew about this more than a week ago, but had gone ahead with plans to buy a kit for Dynamos. “We have reached an agreement that the NetOne logo will be displayed in front while the BancABC logo will be displayed at the back,” Dynamos secretary general Ray Kazembe told our sister paper,The Standard yesterday.
But when the teams walked into the match venue yesterday, Motor Action were all smart in gold while Dynamos were exactly the opposite of the deal that Kazembe said had been reached.
The technical team, however, was in the mobile network provider’s T-shirts together with the substitutes.
Perhaps, Kazembe being new at Dynamos, forgot, like South Africa’s Bafana Bafana, to read the fine print in the contract between his team and BancABC and the agreement between NetOne and the Premier Soccer League.
But probably Dynamos had overlooked the conditions and looked at the final figure at the bottom of the contract.
This development came just 24 hours after this paper’s Southern Edition had stated that Highlanders, also sponsored by BancABC, had categorically stated that they had no deal with new mobile network company Broadacom.
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And we state what Highlanders treasurer Odiel Nkomo said: “Highlanders does not have any association with that company, nothing at all. This actually antagonises sponsors that we already have.”
But from yesterday’s match, is BancABC guilty of ambush marketing or they are simply making sure terms of their contract with Dynamos are adhered to in full?
Wikipedia defines ambush marketing as a marketing strategy wherein the advertisers associate themselves with, and therefore capitalise on, a particular event without paying any sponsorship fee.
The Macmillan English Dictionary defines ambush marketing as a marketing strategy in which a competing brand connects itself with a major sporting event without paying sponsorship fee.According to McCarthy, ambush marketing is a type of marketing by a company that is not an official sponsor of an event, but which places advertisements using the event, to induce customers to pay attention to the advertisement.
From a theoretical perspective, ambush marketing refers to a company’s attempt to capitalise on the goodwill, reputation, and popularity of a particular event by creating an association with it, without the authorisation or consent of the necessary parties.
